inental literature,
and particularly in the very latest Russian drama, this determination to
see blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of
existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully
frequent. In England we had a poet of considerable power, whose tragic
figure crossed me in my youth, in whose work there is not a single gleam
of hope or dignity for man;--I mean the unfortunate James Thomson,
author of _The City of Dreadful Night_. I cannot but believe that the
poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, will insist less
emphatically upon human failure and less savagely upon the revolt of
man. I anticipate in the general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness
of tribute to the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct.
I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of the
spectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not the grotesque and
squalid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat.

It has been admirably said, in a charming essay, that "History may be
abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal;
but poetry must be full of human life." This consideration, I think, may
make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poetic
expression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever changes may be
introduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur in
religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification of
composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossible
for me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of complete
and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time,
but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic
reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action
possible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the
hopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic
imagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formal
art. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of
the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such
as was presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank
verse lyrics in _The Princess_, by Browning in the more brilliant parts
of _One Word More_, by Swinburne in his fulminating _Sapphics_, may be
as little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in _MacFlecknoe_